Cockburn’s portrayal of Isabella was far milder and more sympathetic than those that had appeared in the press. His private life may have influenced his view of her – as the lover of an unmarried woman who had borne him two children, he knew that a ‘fallen’ woman was not necessarily a wicked one. He was also aware of the wretchedness of Isabella’s marriage: having read the whole diary, he and his fellow judges knew of Henry Robinson’s infidelity and rapacity, neither of which had been alluded to in court.
The judges had found no evidence, said Cockburn, that Mrs Robinson was insane. If the scenes that Isabella narrated had been ‘the delusions of a disordered mind,’ as the defence lawyers claimed, ‘we should, no doubt, have found, what is usual in such cases, the statement or confession of them to others, not a mere recording of them among the other events of her life in a secret journal, to be seen by no eye but her own’. Isabella’s capacity for secrecy, he implied, was evidence of sanity.
Not all of the judges had been of this mind the previous summer: Wightman had argued on 21 June 1858 that it was ‘evident’ that Isabella was ‘labouring under delusions of a peculiar character, arising from chronic disease’. Either he had been persuaded to change his views by March 1859, or he was over-ruled by Cockburn and Cresswell.
If Isabella had been mad, Cockburn continued, ‘probably, too, we should have found more distinct and unequivocal statements of the full consummation of her desires than are to be met with in the diary. Certainly, we should not have found, in so many instances, complaints of imperfect pleasure or of painful disappointment.’ As Cockburn noticed, the realism of the diary rested not only on its naturalistic detail and its precision about dates and times and weather conditions but also on its accounts of sexual frustration (the ‘half-realised bliss’ of her first encounters with Edward) and of humiliating rejection (at the hands of Thom and Le Petit as well as the doctor). In several passages, Isabella showed herself painfully alive to the discrepancy between her fantasies and her experience. Such entries could hardly be construed as the products of delusion.
Cockburn then turned to the arguments of Henry’s lawyers, only to dismiss those too. The diary, he said, was not a confession of adultery. It contained ‘no clear and unequivocal admission of adultery having taken place’. The passage that most strongly suggested a consummation, said Cockburn, was that in which Edward, after a passionate encounter with Isabella, ‘desired her to take care to “obviate consequences”, but even here the “consequences” referred to may have been those of detection in a criminal intimacy, not those resulting from actual adultery’.
In Isabella’s descriptions of her amorous moments with the doctor, Cockburn said, ‘the language is ambiguous. It may be taken to import actual consummation or to refer only to indecent familiarities and caresses.’ He conceded that the court would usually be inclined to ‘give the fullest effect’ to accounts of this kind, to infer adultery from scenes of illicit intimacy, but he believed that the language of Isabella’s diary should ‘be construed by a different rule’. When writing about men to whom she was attracted, her imagination and passion led her ‘beyond the bounds of reason and truth’, and she was ‘prone to exaggerate and overcolour every circumstance which tended to her gratification’. Since Isabella had taken erotic pleasure in writing down her experiences, he suggested, she was likely to have heightened and embroidered the truth: the diary’s prime purpose was not to document her past but to delight her present. ‘It is plain that she dwells with impure gratification on the portraiture of these scenes, and on the details of the guilty endearments and caresses which she narrates,’ Cockburn said. ‘To statements so made it is not open to us to add anything by way of inference.’
The Divorce Court rarely heard direct evidence of sexual intercourse. It depended on inference, on deducing a consummation from evidence of desire and opportunity. There was little doubt of either in this case. But Cockburn claimed that although something illicit had obviously gone on between Edward and Isabella, he could not be sure of what. By refusing to infer, even from a written confession, he effectively surrendered the court’s power to interpret.
Cockburn concluded by dismissing Henry Robinson’s petition for divorce. ‘We regret the position of the petitioner,’ he said, ‘who remains burdened with a wife who has thus placed on record the confession of her misconduct; or, at all events, even if the most favourable view be taken of the case, of unfaithful thoughts and unchaste desires; but we can only afford redress on legal proof of adultery, and that proof we cannot find in the incoherent statements of a narrative so irrational and untrustworthy as that of Mrs Robinson.’
Of the 302 petitions for dissolution brought before the court in its first fifteen months, Henry’s was one of only six to be refused. Isabella had won.
After Cockburn had delivered his judgment, Bovill asked the court to grant Isabella’s costs – that is, to rule that Henry, as the loser, should pay her legal expenses. These amounted to £636, including the court’s fees, the solicitors’ and barristers’ charges, the cost of copying the diary and the allowances paid to the witnesses. Cockburn briskly dismissed the application. Given the peculiar circumstances of the case, he said, and the fact that Isabella had an independent income, she must foot her own bill. Bovill asked whether the court would order Mr Robinson to pay Dr Lane’s costs. Cockburn said that he had not expected this request, and was not prepared to decide upon it. Edward’s lawyers could raise the issue at a later date, he said, adding, sharply, ‘if in the exercise of their discretion his counsel think fit to do so’. Having so narrowly secured a victory, he implied, they would be ill-advised to press their point.
Cockburn and Wightman withdrew, leaving Cresswell to deal with the rest of the day’s business.
The few editorials about Cockburn’s judgment simply reported that Dr Lane had been exonerated. The Examiner – under the editorship of the Moor Park patient Marmion Savage – airily asserted: ‘it is enough to state that the divorce has been refused, with the result of substantially as well as formally establishing the innocence of the male defendant. The judgment will be highly satisfactory to the public, on account of Doctor Lane. It now appears that opinion was not more general in his favour than it was just, when the subject was so much in discussion last summer.’ The Medical Times & Gazette claimed that ‘Dr Lane has been the victim of the erotic maniacal ravings of the unfortunate woman who was proved to have committed adultery in her heart’.
The story that endured was that Isabella’s journal was a fiction and Dr Lane was entirely innocent. The barrister John Paget in 1860 cited the case as an example of the power of delusion: ‘nothing could be clearer, more explicit, or more astounding’ than the diary’s account of Isabella’s affair with Edward Lane, Paget wrote; but ‘it was established beyond a doubt that the lady, though apparently conducting herself like other people, and giving no external sign of disordered intellect, was upon this particular subject altogether insane’.
But Cockburn in his judgment had said nothing of the kind. Rather, he had deemed Isabella sane and her diary essentially truthful. Though the journal contained elements of melodrama and sentimental fiction, the judges considered that as a whole it told a nuanced story, rendered credible by its self-recrimination, disappointment and doubt. Its exaggerations and excesses were those familiar to any diarist, to any desperately unhappy person or to anyone in love. It was ultimately not a work of madness but of realism, an account of the limits of romantic dreams. In effect, the court had decided to let Edward off on a technicality: since Isabella had not explicitly detailed a sexual consummation, the judges ruled, the degree of her intimacy with Edward was impossible to gauge.
Cockburn and his fellow judges afterwards supplied the editors of a legal digest of the early Divorce Court cases with the sections of Isabella’s diary upon which they had relied. Since the verdict had turned entirely on the diary, the editors wrote, it was ‘thought advisable to print the following extracts from that journal, and
some pains have been taken to choose such portions as should give a fair idea of the whole’. The extracts amounted to about 9,000 words, almost double the number that appeared in the newspapers during the trial. They included half of the entries Isabella wrote in Edinburgh in 1850 and 1852; nearly all of those she wrote at Ripon Lodge between 1852 and 1854; and most of those she composed at Moor Park and Boulogne in 1855. This last batch, in which Isabella recorded Edward’s passion dissolving into indifference, most powerfully established the journal’s veracity. The extra material appeared in a book directed at legal specialists – Swabey and Tristram’s Reports of Cases Decided in the Court of Probate and in the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes: Volume I (1860) – and went unreported in the press.
After the trial, Edward was able to return to his family and his work. Isabella was left impoverished, disgraced and friendless, with the same confused desires that had propelled her into this mess: her impulse to write, her hunger for sex, her yearning for companionship, her intellectual curiosity, her wish to be with her sons.
Yet she had achieved some of her desires: she had defeated Henry, sacrificed herself for Edward, and made some amends to the women whose trust she had abused. As George Combe had recommended, she had harnessed the energies of her oversized faculties: she resisted the divorce suit because, with her Amativeness, she loved Edward Lane; because, with her Adhesiveness, she treasured her attachment to him and his family; because, with her Love of Approbation, she longed for them to respect her; and because, with her small organ of Veneration, she set no store by the social and judicial systems that required her to obey her husband or the law. By her moral code, Henry deserved to be punished and Edward, Mary and Lady Drysdale to be spared.
As she had written in her last letter to Combe, her one wish after the loss of her diary and her sons was to ‘atone to this friend & his family in some degree for the serious mischief & sorrow I have so wantonly but unintentionally occasioned them’. For them, she wrote, ‘I have entertained nothing but the deepest regard & gratitude, wholly so’. Her ‘confession’ that the diary was a delusion was ‘the only poor reparation I have now at command’. The harm that she had inflicted on herself, and on her three boys, was, in any case, beyond fixing.
Isabella had proved herself capable of restraint and self-sacrifice: she had allowed herself in the course of the trial to be made the focus of the most fervid contemporary anxieties about suppressed female sexuality and madness. Yet her pride was not extinguished. She was still defiant as well as sorry, angry with the world as well as with herself. She was furious with Henry, whose crime in reading her journal she believed far surpassed her own in writing it, and also with a society that had sanctioned his sexual conduct while it condemned hers: ‘Is the infamy of his own private life,’ she asked, ‘not to be taken into account?’
In August 1859, Parliament passed a further series of amendments to the Divorce Act, including a provision to protect public morality: ‘The Court, when for the sake of Public Decency it shall so think fit, may hold its Sittings with closed Doors.’ The doors of a court, like the covers of a diary, were sometimes best kept shut.
See Notes on Chapter 12
13
IN DREAMS THAT CANNOT BE LAID
1859 & after
After the fierce blaze of the trial, the Robinsons, the Lanes and most of their associates returned to lives of relative anonymity.
Edward Lane’s reputation survived the scandal. ‘I am glad to say that not one of Dr Lane’s patients has given him up,’ reported Charles Darwin in 1859, ‘& he gets a few fresh ones pretty regularly.’ Darwin was finally publishing his book about evolution. The attendant anxiety brought on attacks of ill health, and with them repeated trips to Moor Park.
In 1860, Edward and Mary Lane and Lady Drysdale moved to a spa at Sudbrook Park in Richmond, Surrey, equipped with one of the first Turkish baths in Britain. By the time that Darwin took the water cure at the new premises in June that year, he had become famous: ‘The controversy excited by the appearance of Darwin’s remarkable work on the Origin of Species,’ said the Saturday Review in May, ‘has passed beyond the bounds of the study and lecture room into the drawing room and the public street.’
Edward continued to promote the benefits of good diet, clean air, plentiful exercise and hot and cold water. He had published a book on the subject – Hydropathy; or, the Natural System of Medical Treatment: an Explanatory Essay – in 1857, and he followed this with Medicine Old and New in 1873 and a pamphlet, Hygienic Medicine, in 1885. It is likely that the Drysdale family forgave him his entanglement with Isabella Robinson, just as they had forgiven George when his sexual urges prompted him to fake his own death in the 1840s. Mary and Edward’s relationship had been forged in the pain and sadness of George’s breakdown, and Lady Drysdale knew how to welcome home a prodigal son.
The novelist Catherine Crowe, who had withdrawn from the public eye after her naked escapade in Edinburgh, visited Sudbrook Park in December 1860. She found Lady Drysdale ‘as young and jolly as ever’. Though Mrs Crowe was apparently restored to sanity, she still communed with spirits: ‘the Love of my youth, and indeed the love of all my life … protects me and takes care of me’, she confided in a letter to a friend that winter. ‘I am perfectly willing to take the eternal vows and he says the same of himself. I wd at any time have forsaken all the world for him and would now if her were “in the human”, that’s what he calls being in the body.’ She was in love with a ghost.
John Thom secured a job at the monthly newspaper Home News, run by Edward’s patient Robert Bell and distributed in India and Australia. But after a couple of years in a damp City office he decided to migrate to Australia himself. Charles Darwin contributed £20 towards his travel costs, and Thom sailed for Queensland in 1863.
Edward and Mary’s eldest son, Atty, died at Sudbrook Park in 1878 aged twenty-nine, after a lifetime of ill health. The family moved the next year to Harley Street, a Georgian terrace in Marylebone renowned for its specialist physicians. They remained there for the next decade. Lady Drysdale died in 1887, aged one hundred, bequeathing a substantial fortune of £47,000 to her children. When Edward and then Mary followed her – in 1889 and 1891, aged sixty-six and sixty-eight – they left their money to their sons William and Sydney, both stockbrokers. Their youngest, Walter, had been removed from his father’s will in 1888, for ‘certain family considerations’.
George and Charles Drysdale practised together as doctors in London into the twentieth century, lobbying all the while for women’s suffrage, contraception and freer sexual relations. George repeatedly revised and reprinted the radical book about sex that he had written as a medical student, known after 1861 as The Elements of Social Science. Charles became the spokesman for the brothers’ beliefs. He edited The Malthusian magazine and wrote dozens of books and pamphlets on venereal disease, poverty, prostitution and overpopulation.
Neither George nor Charles married but both lived with women. Charles had two sons with Alice Vickery, one of the first women in England to obtain a medical degree. George shared a house in Bournemouth, Dorset, with Susannah Spring, a widow listed in the 1901 census as his housekeeper, to whom he bequeathed two properties in the town. After George’s death in 1904, Charles revealed that his older brother was the author of The Elements of Social Science, which was now in its thirty-fifth edition and had sold 90,000 copies. It had been published anonymously, Charles said, to protect their mother from scandal. Charles died three years later.
After the Robinson trial, Sir Cresswell Cresswell remained in charge of the Divorce Court for a further four years, acquiring a reputation as a friend to married women. ‘Sir Cresswell Cresswell represents 5,000,000 of English wives,’ ran a piece in Once a Week in 1860. ‘Brother husbands! We are betrayed!’ By the time that he died in July 1863, after a fall from his horse, he had ruled on more than a thousand matrimonial cases, only one of which had been reversed on appeal. Lord Palmerston, who in 1857 had steered th
e Divorce Act through Parliament, was himself cited as a co-respondent in a divorce suit four months after Cresswell’s death; the case was dismissed only because it was not clear that the petitioner and respondent were married. In 1867, on the tenth anniversary of the Divorce Act, The Times claimed that this piece of legislation had set in motion ‘one of the greatest social revolutions of our time’. The revolution in sexual attitudes precipitated by the publication of George Drysdale’s book – and even of Isabella Robinson’s diary extracts – was to prove no less significant.
Sir Alexander Cockburn continued to preside over celebrated cases in the law courts. On occasion he was criticised for vanity and for flaws in his logic; but he was admired for his worldly common sense as a judge. In 1864, Queen Victoria refused to give him a peerage on the grounds that he had a ‘notoriously bad moral character’. He was appointed Lord Chief Justice in 1875, and died five years later, leaving most of his fortune to his illegitimate son.
It turned out that George Combe had been right to predict the sexual delinquency of the Prince of Wales. Queen Victoria believed that her husband’s death in 1861 was due in part to the shock of learning that the nineteen-year-old Bertie had lost his virginity to an actress in Ireland. Over the remaining forty years of his mother’s reign, the future Edward VII gained a reputation as a tireless philanderer.
Like Isabella, Combe had not had the chance to sift and sort his private papers before they fell into the hands of others. After his death in 1858, Cecy preserved his correspondence, and his trustees donated it to the National Library of Scotland in 1950. They may not have noticed – as Isabella did not notice on a first reading – that in his letters of February 1858 he had coached Mrs Robinson into pleading insanity.
Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady Page 21
